Second Chances Box Set

by Jason Ayres

  This man was white and middle-aged – in his early fifties at a guess. Not only did he not look like a terrorist, but also it was illogical to even think that he might be. Why would anyone want to blow up an empty hospital room with nothing but a dead body and a cheap, plastic Christmas tree in it?

  Whoever he was, he ought not to be there, and I had no hesitation in challenging him.

  “Who are you?” I demanded, determined not to show any fear despite the distinctly uneasy feeling flooding through my body. “What are you doing in here?”

  “I’m Doctor Gardner,” he said, in a ludicrously posh accent that just had to be put on as he cast his gaze down at my name badge. “I’m a specialist, visiting from Harley Street. I’m delighted to meet you, Amy.”

  I wasn’t convinced for a moment by his overblown acting. Who did he think he was, Hugh Grant? I was also not impressed by him ogling my breasts during his laughably poor performance.

  “Don’t give me that,” I replied, “and stop staring at my tits. None of the doctors in this hospital or anywhere else wear white coats anymore. What they do wear is ID, so where’s yours?”

  “Ah yes, one of the chaps down on security was going to print it off for me earlier this evening,” he ventured. “I must pop down and pick it up at some point.”

  I just looked at him with a face that said, “Really?” I didn’t even have to utter the word. He could see I didn’t believe a word of it and changed tack.

  “Look, I’ll come clean,” he said, reverting to a normal accent. “I’m not a doctor, I’m a scientist attached to the university carrying out some research here. I just need a couple of minutes, that’s all. Then I’ll be out of your hair.”

  Was he telling the truth? With his backpack along with waving a strange metal, wand-like device around in front of him, I guess he could pass for a scientist, but not a lucid and bona fide one. He looked more like some crazy character from a sci-fi movie. All he was lacking was the wild, Einstein-style hair.

  A more likely explanation was that he was some sort of escaped mental patient and if that was the case, I could well be in danger. Mindful of last year’s incident on the ward, I decided the best course of action would be to call for some help.

  “I’m sorry, that’s not good enough,” I replied. “People don’t go around hospitals in the middle of the night wearing dubious disguises unless they’re up to no good.”

  “What can I get up to in here?” protested the fake Doctor Gardner, gesturing towards the body on the bed. “It’s not as if I’ve come to bump him off, is it? It’s a bit late for that: the Grim Reaper’s already been and gone.”

  “I’m calling security,” I replied, moving towards the telephone on the wall beside the door.

  “No, don’t do that,” he protested, and began to move to cut me off. That was all the provocation I needed. Issuing a silent prayer of thanks for the recently improved security measures, I headed for the panic button on the wall behind the bed instead, reaching it just before he was able to stop me.

  His attempt to block my path had been more than a little unsettling. I really hoped that whoever was on security was paying attention and not snoozing on the job.

  Doctor Gardner, if that was his real name, backed off once he saw the flashing red button on the wall.

  “Since when have hospitals had panic buttons?” he asked, looking unsettled.

  He was on the back foot all of a sudden which gave me a chance to seize the initiative. I had no intention of showing him any weakness so, keeping my voice as level as I could, I spelled out the situation in black and white.

  “Since last year when a patient assaulted a nurse on this very ward,” I replied. “Do you have any idea how much abuse we get from the drunks that get hauled in here every weekend? Now you’ve got less than two minutes until security arrives from downstairs to escort you from the premises – and that won’t be pleasant. They don’t take too kindly to women being threatened and can get quite heavy-handed. If I were you, I would scarper now, while you still can.”

  This was a blatant lie. The aging head of security, Barry, spent the vast majority of his time sitting in his office drinking tea and eating biscuits. He hadn’t seen any action since his Army days, decades in the past. Most of his colleagues were no better. But this stranger wasn’t to know that.

  “Fine,” he said, “but I’ll be back and you won’t even know about it.”

  I assumed that meant he was going to leave, but he didn’t show any signs of departing by the traditional method, i.e. through the door. Instead he pointed his weird device in front of him and started pressing buttons on it. It was the first time I had seen it and it looked like something out of Doctor Who.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, becoming increasingly convinced that he was some sort of nutter.

  “Nothing for you to worry about,” was his reply.

  This man had seriously lost the plot. What did he think he was going to do – teleport out of there with his home-made remote control TV aerial?

  Ironically, outlandish as that idea had seemed at the time, given what happened next I may not have been far off the mark. Because this was the moment when the weird sci-fi shit started happening, leading me to realise that he was more than just a weirdo after all. Of course, it was too late to do anything about it by then. I was caught up in whatever was going on and it was too late to avoid it. I was well and truly over my event horizon.

  What happened was all over very quickly. Suddenly there seemed to be two of him in the room, the second one seemingly appearing out of nowhere. He hadn’t come through the door, that’s for sure, as I would have seen him from where I was standing.

  This other version looked exactly the same, right down to the white coat. Could they be twins or was it some kind of visual trickery? There was no time to figure it out as something else was already happening.

  They had both been pointing their wands across the room, close to Thomas’s bed. Then I heard a long-drawn-out cry of “Nooooo!” from one or possibly both of the men, in the style of some overly dramatic movie scene. I might have found this amusing if I had been watching from afar, rather than being an unwilling participant.

  Then everything descended into a kaleidoscopic, whirling maelstrom of colour and noise. As multiple mirror images of myself, the stranger and the body on the bed swirled all around me, I felt myself being sucked by a hugely powerful force towards the centre of the room.

  Like a spider in a bathtub being drawn towards the plughole, I flailed my arms helplessly, completely powerless to escape. It was the last thing I remembered before I blacked out.

  And that is how all of this began.

  Chapter Three

  2023

  When I woke up the first time after it happened I was disorientated, panicky and confused. It was similar to that feeling you get when waking up from a very vivid dream or nightmare.

  Just as with one of those dreams, for the first few seconds of consciousness everything that had happened seemed absolutely real. Then, as familiar surroundings reasserted themselves, reality began to kick back in.

  The sense of relief that it had all been just a dream washed over me. That feeling was to be only temporary. The events of the next hour or so would see to that.

  The reassuringly safe place I found myself in was my bedroom in my flat in Headington, an area to the north of Oxford. It was purpose-built accommodation for nurses, less than half a mile from the John Radcliffe Hospital.

  I shared the flat with two other girls and it had been my home for nearly four years, since shortly after my pig of an ex had done the dirty on me. This had left me needing to find somewhere else to live in a hurry.

  The ultimate result was that I found myself going the wrong way on the property ladder, from being a homeowner back to renting. This was really not something you wanted to be doing in a place like Oxford where house prices marched relentlessly upwards, regardless of the state of the economy.

  Fortuna
tely for me, at least in the short term, I was not to end up homeless. A new government, determined to tackle the inequality in society created by the runaway housing market, had decided to take decisive action. In addition to building a million new council homes over four years, they had pledged millions of pounds towards an enhanced key worker scheme.

  This was designed to help nurses, teachers and other professionals to have somewhere to live in areas where they were priced out of the housing market. Oxford was just about the most unaffordable place in the country to live based on the ratio of housing costs to average wages, and had been one of the first to be chosen for the scheme.

  This meant a new programme of building social housing specifically for people like me. It had created a home for me, Phoebe and Lily, three single nurses, for which we paid the very reasonable sum of £325 a month each in rent.

  The downside was that the flat came with the job – so I was stuck with nursing for life now, unless I won the lottery. That didn’t bother me for now as I enjoyed my job, but I didn’t like the prospect of being tied to it permanently. What if I wanted a change of career later on?

  The flat we lived in was one of several in a new ultra-high tech building. It had been built on the site of an old tower block which had been condemned and demolished over fire safety concerns after a catastrophic fire in a similar London structure a few years previously.

  Our state-of-the-art new home was just about as eco-friendly as you could get. From solar panels on the roof to a rain-harvesting system, every resource was maximised. The government had dubbed them the homes of the future and dozens of them were now going up in cities all over Britain.

  Phoebe and Lily were younger than me, in their mid-twenties, but the age gap hadn’t been a problem. I had taken on a new lease of life since I had split with Rob and it was as if those nine years wasted on him had never happened.

  Far from finding my energetic, young flatmates annoying, I found their various antics amusing and, despite all being strangers when we moved in, we soon became firm friends. They were outsiders in Oxford, just as I had once been, and we gelled almost straight away.

  There was certainly a lively mix of accents in the house. Although I had lived in Oxford for many years, my Scouse accent still prevailed, and along with Lily – a Geordie, and Phoebe, from Cornwall, we had at least three corners of England covered.

  Being younger they hadn’t got themselves tied up in any emotional baggage yet, so were still carefree, fit and up for fun.

  Lily was the elder of the two, a small pixie-like girl with elfish features and black hair that curled down in small tangles around her face. She loved to wear old-fashioned, hippyish clothes, with flowers in her hair and plenty of necklaces and bracelets. She was also adorned all over with tattoos, which I had to admit were tastefully done, even though tattoos had never been my thing.

  Despite being only twenty-seven she had a taste for the older, indie music that her parents had brought her up on. The tunes of The Cure, New Order and The Mission could often be heard blaring out from her room.

  “I’m a girl out of time,” she once said to me. “My mother saw all of these bands at Glastonbury in the late-80s. If I had a time machine and could go back in time, that’s where I’d go. People knew how to enjoy themselves in those days.”

  Lily loved her festivals and had tried to persuade me a number of times to go to Glastonbury or Reading with her. I had resisted, being a little too fond of my creature comforts and adequate toilet facilities to want to rough it there. She assured me that it wasn’t like that anymore and I could have all mod cons if I wanted them. I had never been to a festival, so in the end, I agreed and all three of us had begun making plans to go the following year.

  Phoebe, at twenty-five, was a couple of years younger than Lily and had been newly qualified as a nurse when we had moved into the flat. Her look was a complete contrast to Lily’s. She was blonde and carrying a few extra pounds, but in a way that complemented her figure, rather than making her look overweight. She had a youthful chubbiness that gave her curves in all the right places and boobs to die for, as well as having a rounded, welcoming face.

  She had a much more relaxed attitude to clothing in comparison to Lily’s elaborate outfits. For Phoebe it was T-shirts and joggers most of the time when she was just slobbing around the flat. She rarely wore a bra at home and it wasn’t unknown for her to wander around the flat half-naked in the summertime. I wasn’t bothered about that at all, but it irked Lily who was relatively flat-chested by comparison.

  Although I didn’t have any leanings towards women, I couldn’t help admiring Phoebe’s confidence in her body, and those tits – well, they were pretty awesome and I didn’t mind seeing them on display. I had a decent pair myself, so I had been told, but Phoebe’s put mine to shame. They seemed to defy gravity, unlike mine which were definitely starting to sag with age.

  Phoebe’s exhibitionism didn’t do any harm as far as I was concerned. We were all confirmed heterosexuals and all single – which made for a lot of fun. We would go out together on the nights when we were all off work and it wasn’t unusual for one of us to bring someone back.

  More often than not it was Phoebe, which meant that Lily and I would need to put our earphones in for the night. Phoebe’s uninhibited nature also meant she didn’t hold back on the noise when she was enjoying the attentions of a man.

  It was rare for me to pull these days, but I didn’t mind as the three of us were having a lot of fun. It was without doubt the best time I’d had for years but it came with a price. At the back of my mind, was the endless tick-tock, tick-tock of the biological clock. It went hand in hand with a feeling that perhaps I ought not to be doing this sort of thing at my age.

  It was alright for Lily and Phoebe – they had time on their side – but I was a late thirty-something playing at being their age and I knew I couldn’t keep it up forever.

  The age gap didn’t manifest itself in our day-to-day interactions but there was one activity that really showed it up. When we went clubbing, the girls seemed to be able to dance away all night, just as I had at their age. But that was fifteen years ago and now my body was protesting in no uncertain terms. My feet were aching after about half an hour, the music was dreadful and too loud, and there was never anywhere to sit down.

  Often on these nights out I secretly wished I was at home having a cup of tea and watching Coronation Street on catch-up. I tried to brush these thoughts off, reminding myself that I was enjoying the last gasp of what little youth I had left and I should be making the most of it because soon it would be gone.

  I hadn’t known then that I was wrong about that – how could I? I knew nothing about the life-changing event which was soon to restore my youth to me. But I was about to find out because it was on this particular morning that my peculiar new back-to-front existence began.

  I didn’t realise right away that anything was wrong – I was where I woke up every day, after all, but then I realised that I couldn’t remember anything about going to bed the previous day. I remembered all that weird stuff from the hospital room but still thought that had been a dream at this point, despite its continuing presence in my mind. I cast my mind back, trying to figure it all out.

  I recalled being at work but nothing afterwards – certainly nothing about finishing work and going home. I felt rough and incredibly groggy as I sat up in the room, trying to get my head together. Was this a hangover?

  There had been more than one occasion I had woken up in my life so hung-over that I couldn’t recall the details of what had gone on the night before. Unfortunately cameras often caught the sordid evidence for all to see and there were frequent occasions when I would open up my social media dreading what I was going to find.

  Often it didn’t make for pleasant viewing – some bleary-eyed photos of myself with random people, half of whom I didn’t even know, or some drunken, ridiculous comments on a Facebook status that I recall neither reading nor writing. />
  Was today one such occasion? It was hard to see how it could be. I had been working nights, and unlike some of my colleagues who considered a pint in Wetherspoons to be an acceptable end to a night’s work, I preferred to go straight home and go to bed.

  The only other possibility was that I’d had a total blackout and somehow lost an entire day but I’d never been that drunk before, even in the wildest days of my youth. If that was the reason why I was in this state, then my flatmates were bound to have been involved. They liked to party and it wasn’t inconceivable that they had got me so paralytic on my birthday that I couldn’t remember what I’d done.

  There was only one thing to do – I would have to go out there and face the two of them. If I had done something embarrassingly awful, they would know about it. But to prepare myself, I would first check social media for clues about any possible indiscretions. That meant I needed my phone. I had been lying on my back for about five minutes pondering all this, but now I sat up, ready to face the music.

  The curtains were drawn but they were pale lemon in colour which let through a small amount of daylight. It was just enough light for me to locate my phone on the bedside table, plugged into its charger. Like a lot of people, I ignored the advice not to have electronic gadgets in the bedroom, unable to bear being more than a few feet away from my phone at any one time.

  I managed to get hold of it, but couldn’t get past the screen lock. It usually operated on a thumbprint, but that wasn’t working for some reason. It was asking for a PIN. I tried the one I had used on my old phone, 0101, and it let me in.

  Yes, I know 0101 is my birthday and I shouldn’t use it because it’s the first thing hackers try, but I’ve tried using other numbers and I just end up forgetting them. It’s the same reason I use the same password for all my internet stuff which is the name of my first cat plus the year of my birth. I’d never keep track of it all otherwise.